Monday, April 27, 2015

The Open Access Interviews: Publisher MDPI

Headquartered in Basel,
Switzerland, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, or more usually
MDPI, is an open access
publisher that has had a challenging few years. It has been charged with excessively
spamming researchers in order to maximise APC revenue, it has
been accused of publishing pseudoscience, and it has been criticised for publishing
papers of very poor quality. This has occasionally led to editorial board resignations
e.g. here and here.

The criticism came to a head in
February last year, when University of Colorado (Denver) librarian Jeffrey Beall added MDPI
to his controversial list of “Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access
publishers”.

Today I am publishing a Q&A
with MDPI. First however, in the way of background, I want to rehearse some key
events (in date order). Please scroll down if you want to go direct to the interview.= Update: Jeffrey Beall removed MDPI from his list on 27th October 2015 =

A target for criticism, but favoured by some

MDPI AG was
spun out of Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) in 2010 by the owner of both organisations Shu-Kun
Lin, along with the then CEO of MDPI Dietrich Rordorf. In the process
a number of journals were relocated to MDPI, and since then MDPI’s portfolio of
open access journals has grown to 137.
Last year MDPI published over 12,000 papers.

MDPI’s difficulties appear to have started in December 2010, when one
of its journals — Life — published a paper by Erik Andruliscalled Theory
of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life. Aiming to present a framework
to explain life, the paper was greeted with scepticism and ridicule. The popular
science and technology magazines Ars Technica and Popular Science, for instance, characterised
the ideas in the paper as “crazy” and “hilarious”.

The publication of the paper led to a member of Life’s editorial board resigning,
and Shu-Kin Lin published a response to the criticism. In his response, Shu-Kin Lin
conceded that he had taken over responsibility for the review process when the
researcher assigned to the task (a Professor Bassez) has pulled out for
personal reasons. But he insisted that the paper had been properly peer
reviewed, and that it had been revised in response to the reports of two
reviewers. His explanation, however, attracted further criticism.

In April 2011 a second controversy erupted when the
MDPI journal Nutrients published a paper called The Australian Paradox: A Substantial
Decline in Sugars Intake over the Same Timeframe that Overweight and Obesity
Have Increased. This too attracted criticism, and an Australian economist
created a website in order to
launch a campaign to have the paper retracted. (There is also a Wikipedia page
on the paper here).

The Australian Paradox paper has not been retracted,
but it has twice been corrected by the authors (in 2011 and 2014), and in 2012 the
Editor-in-Chief published an editorial
about the paper, along with a response
to the criticism from the authors. In addition, in July 2014 the University of
Sydney (the institution where one of the authors is based) published an independent report
concluding that of the seven criticisms that had been levelled at the authors
the “only allegation substantiated concerned two ‘simple arithmetic’ errors,
specifically an inconsistency and an incorrect calculation”.

Notwithstanding these controversies, MDPI has attracted many supporters,
not least amongst OA advocates and cognoscenti of open access. When, on 31st
October 2012, MDPI launched a new open access journal called Publications, for instance, it was able to recruit well-regarded
scholars who specialise in research on open access to its editorial board. Currently,
membership of the board includes Mikael
Laakso and Bo-Christer
Björk (Björk has also published
in the journal), and at one time de facto
leader of the open access movement Peter Suber also served on
the board.

Finally, we could note that at one point Suber was also on the editorial
board of Future Internet, an MDPI journal
that in January 2010 published an article
by Jeffrey Beall called Metadata for Name
Disambiguation and Collocation (a contribution that Beall later said he regretted).

More criticism, followed by a pass

In April 2013, however, another controversy erupted — this time over
the MDPI journal Entropy, which published
a review paper co-authored
by MIT’s Stephanie
Seneff arguing that glyphosate
may be the most important factor in the development of obesity, depression,
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, Alzheimer's disease,
Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, cancer, and infertility.

The paper, which contained no primary research results, attracted
considerable criticism (e.g. here),
and was characterised
by the popular science magazine Discover as pseudoscience. Again,
the paper has not been retracted. Explaining why, MDPI told me: “We have
recently conducted an enquiry into the glyphosate paper, and other papers in
the same special issue. We have decided not to retract, in part based on recent
findings from the International Agency for Research on Cancer [see here
and here]
suggesting that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans’.”

We could note in passing that in total 23 papers have been retracted
from MDPI journals.

In 2013, however, MDPI also passed an important and significant test. On
4th October Science
published an article
— Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? —
which reported on an exercise in which fake scientific papers had been sent to
304 fee-charging open access journals. The papers contained obvious scientific
flaws and so should all have been rapidly rejected. In fact, 157 of the
journals they were submitted to accepted the paper sent to them, with only 98
rejecting it.

One of the journals targeted in this “sting” was MDPI’s Cancers. And to its credit the journal rejected the
paper sent to it, saying: “Although your analysis is interesting, your
manuscript was not given a high priority rating during the initial screening
process.”

And in December 2013 MDPI published a response to the
criticism it was continuing to face for publishing what it characterised as
“controversial articles”. Since the motivations for this criticism “vary widely
and can include political or corporate agendas, and competing economic or intellectual
interests”, suggested MDPI, rather than post critical comments on social
networks and blogs, those wishing to critique MDPI papers should “prepare a
scientifically rigorous Comment and
submit it to the Editors of the journal for editorial review”.

But the criticism did not stop. In fact, the situation deteriorated — on
February 18th 2014 Beall placed
MDPI on his list, alleging (amongst other things) that the publisher was in
the habit of adding scholars (including Nobel Prize winners) to its editorial
boards without their permission, that it had recruited Peter Suber to the
editorial board of Publications in
order to forestall criticism from OA advocates, that it was launching a fleet
of new journals with one-word titles as part of a strategy of creating broad
scope journals that would enable it to boost its APC revenues, and that it was
regularly publishing controversial papers in order to attract publicity.

On 24th February 2014 MDPI published a response to Beall’s
criticisms, refuting all the allegations and pointing out that Beall is no
friend to the open access movement, having the year before mounted a
generalised attack on OA in an article published
in the tripleCjournal called,
“The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access”.

In his article Beall argued that the movement “is an anti-corporatist
movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees
with … [and has] … fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and
standalone journals, increasing the amount of research misconduct in scholarly
publications and the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were
authentic science.”

Subsequent to Beall adding MDPI to his list (in June 2014), Suber
resigned from the editorial board of Publications.
However, he told me, the two events were not connected. “I was overcommitted, I
needed to drop commitments, and I was dropping others at the same time,” he
emailed me.

Again, it is important to stress that MDPI has a
great many supporters. Some researchers report having had a positive experience
publishing in its journals — see here,
here
and here
for instance. In addition, the publisher says, it has recruited 6,500 board
members, is currently experiencing 3.8 million page views per month, and it has
published the work of more than 170,000 unique authors.

We should also point out that MDPI is a member of
the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA),
a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and its journals are listed in
the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Some of its journals are also indexed by PubMed, the Web of Science and Scopus; and some have Impact Factors.

Concerned at the potential consequences of being
placed on Beall’s list, on 25th February 2014, MDPI’s Dietrich
Rordorf emailed the Chancellor of Beall’s institution asking him to intervene (presumably
to have MDPI removed from the list). Rordorf complained that Beall was
publishing false information about MDPI. He also pointed out that 14 members of
UC Denver faculty had published papers with MDPI, and 65 had reviewed papers
for it. In addition, he added, one also serves on the editorial board of
MDPI’s Antibodies journal.

Rordorf’s request appears to have fallen on deaf
ears. As MDPI explains below, “We were referred to a legal counsel and informed
that the university was unwilling to investigate inclusion in Beall’s list.”

In the event despite being placed on Beall’s list, MDPI
has seen the number of researchers based at UC Denver who have published papers
with grow
to 34.

Another pass

In 2014 MDPI passed another important test. Conscious that MDPI is a member
of its organisation, OASPA conducted an enquiry into its activities, examining
the review process that the controversial papers published by Life and Nutrients had undergone, and investigating the various allegations
raised by Beall. The conclusion: On April 11th 2014 OASPA announced
that “Based on our findings we feel satisfied that MDPI continue to meet the
OASPA Membership Criteria.”

Presumably to help reassure researchers about the rigour of MDPI’s peer
review process, on 16th May 2014 the then Editor-in-Chief of Lifeannounced that the journal
planned to introduce a form of open peer review.

For all that, Beall has not removed MDPI from his list. When I asked
him about this he replied, “I do not believe I was wrong to place them on my
list. I do think the firm belongs there.”

Clearly frustrated at Beall’s refusal to remove MDPI from his web site,
on 14th November 2014 Shu-Kun Lin sent a personal email to Beall,
saying, amongst other things, “If you remove the post and remove MDPI from your
black list, I can give you the money and help you to do your critics correctly.”

When I asked Beall how he had understood Shu-Kun Lin’s message he
replied, “I interpreted his offer of money as an offer to pay me to remove MDPI
from my list.”

Explaining his intention below, however, Shu-Kun Lin says, “This offer
was to try to help Mr Beall professionalise his operation. Services such as
COPE, OASPA and Retraction Watch have
managed to maintain themselves and improve their services through raising
additional funds.”

In March this year I had an email forwarded to me in which an unnamed
person who said s/he had worked for MDPI as a student made a number of allegations
about MDPI. The email also suggested contacting former MDPI managing editor Francisco
Teixeira who, the author said, could provide “more crazy stories”.

When I contacted Teixeira he replied, “Let me point out that I parted
ways with MDPI some years ago and have not kept in touch or been updated with any
of the more recent activities of the publisher. I cannot therefore comment on
the current state of the publications. What I can say from the time I worked
there is that the company kept a thorough blind peer review for its journals,
while still aiming at an expedited publication process (which, of course, was
not always possible). Despite having released a ‘fleet’ of journals at the
time, there was a selection of prospective editorial board members and only
with a minimum numbers of members a journal would be launched. As for
publishing fees, they would only be charged in case the paper was accepted for
publishing (no processing fees).”

What to make of it?

So what should we make of all this? Personally, I have come to believe
that we rarely have sufficient information to make judgements about the quality
and probity of any specific publisher, or the rigour of the review process that
any particular paper has undergone prior to publication. This is particularly
unfortunate given that there appears to have been a breakdown of trust in scholarly publishing, not least due to the growing
number of retractions we are witnessing.

What I would prefer to do, therefore, is to pose a few general questions
about the phenomenon of so-called predatory publishing.

1.As commentators like John Dupuis have pointed
out, predation is by no means confined to open access publishers. Most
notoriously, in 2009 it was reported that the leading subscription publisher, Elsevier,
had been publishing
fake journals. These were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and
made to look like peer reviewed medical journals. Might it not be better to
talk about “predatory behaviour” rather than predatory publishers or predatory
journals, and should we not be scrutinising the activities of all scholarly
journals, not just open access journals?

2.We
have got used to talking about predatory publishers. But what about predatory researchers?
And what about the predatory environment in which researchers now have to
operate? Clearly, some publishers are guilty of unethical business practices,
but fundamentally all they are doing is meeting a market demand. In apportioning
blame when things go wrong, therefore, should we not be asking to what extent responsibility
ought to be laid at the feet of the research community, and its dysfunctional
scholarly communication system, as much as at the feet of publishers? Is not
the appalling pressure to publish (both quickly and frequently) that researchers
face today an important contributory factor to the growing number of scandals
and retractions? In other words, should not as much (if not more) blame and
opprobrium be levelled at the causes of the predatory behaviour we see today as
on the publishers who profit from this dysfunctional system?

3.Leaving
aside those instances where publishers do blatantly unethical things — like failing
to send a paper out for review, ignoring the reviews, or creating fake journals
(offences that may in fact be less frequent than we tend to assume) — is it not
the case that ultimate responsibility for the publication of erroneous, shoddy,
fraudulent and/or fake research belongs to the researchers who produce such papers,
and the researchers who fail to review them properly, not to the publisher? After
all, publishers are rarely able to judge the value of a piece of research
themselves. That is why they ask third-party researchers to make the judgement
for them?

4.In light of the current lack of information
available to enable us to adequately judge the activities of scholarly
publishers, or to evaluate the rigour of the publication process that research
papers undergo, should not both scholarly publishers and the research community
be committing themselves to much greater transparency than we see today? For
instance, should not open peer review now be the norm? Should not the reviews
and the names of reviewers be routinely published alongside papers? Should not
the eligibility criteria and application procedures for obtaining APC waivers
be routinely published on a journal’s web site, along with regularly updated data
on how many waivers are being granted? Should not publishers be willing to
declare the nature and extent of the unsolicited email campaigns they engage in
in order to recruit submissions? Should not the full details of “big
deals” and hybrid OA “offsetting
agreements” be made publicly available? Should not publishers be more
transparent about why they charge what they charge for APCs? Should not
publishers be more transparent about their revenues and profits? For instance,
should not privately owned publishers make their accounts available online
(even where there is no legal obligation to do so), and should not public
companies provide more detailed information about the money they earn from
publicly-funded research and exactly how it was earned? And should not publishers
whose revenue comes primarily from the public purse be entirely open about who
owns the company, and where it is based? Should not the research community
refuse to deal with publishers unwilling to do all the above? Did not US Justice Louis D. Brandeis
have a point when he said, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants;
electric light the most efficient policeman.”

These are just a few questions. There are many more that could be asked.

In the meantime, I invite people to read the Q&A below. When I
proposed the interview I invited MDPI founder Shu-Kun Lin and MDPI Chief
Production Officer Martyn Rittman to do it jointly. During the process,
however, they chose to assign many of the answers to MDPI as an entity, rather
than to themselves. In that same spirit, they have provided a group photo to go
with the interview.

The interview begins

RP: Can you both say who you are
and what your role at MDPI is, plus provide some brief details about your
respective backgrounds and careers prior to MDPI?

S-K L: I am founder and
Publisher of MDPI. I was born in Hanchuan, Hubei Province, China and graduated
with a BSc from Wuhan University in January
1982, majoring in inorganic chemistry. I studied physical chemistry in the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences (1982–1986, MSc in 1985) and in the USA (University
of Louisville, 1987–1989).

In 1996, I initiated a samples collection and exchange project, and
founded the international organization MDPI in Switzerland
to implement this. In the same year I launched the first MDPI journal Molecules.
In 2001 I became a professor at the Ocean University of China (OUC).

I became the Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Diversity(Springer) in 2002 and
held this position until my resignation in June 2007. I am the principal author
of over 40 publications.

MR: I am Chief Production
Officer at MDPI. I graduated in mathematics and physics from the University of Warwick in 2004, before
completing an MSc and PhD under Warwick’s interdisciplinary MOAC program. My final
project focused on spectroscopy of DNA and modelling biopolymerization
processes.

I went on to a three year postdoc at the University of Reading, using
atomic force microscopy and small angle X-ray scattering to analyze nano-structured
biomaterials. I followed this with a further postdoctoral position at the University of
Freiburg, developing TIRF microscopy of protein complexes. I joined MDPI in
April 2013.

S-K L: I initially started MDPI
as a project to preserve rare chemical samples, having seen a number of
valuable samples simply disposed of. This project is still running. The first
journal, Molecules, was started in
1996 to publish the synthesis of samples submitted to the collection. From the beginning,
articles have been available for free online.

RP: Where is the company based
and who owns it?

S-K L: MDPI is owned by me
and has been based in Basel, Switzerland since the outset. Since 2008 we have
established three offices in China, two in Beijing and one in Wuhan. However
the headquarters of the company remains in Basel and the management, online publication,
marketing and training activities are organized from this office.

RP: As I understand it there are two separate organisations: the MDPI
Sustainability Foundation (previously Molecular Diversity Preservation International,
which was founded by you and Benoit R Turin in 1996), and MDPI AG, an open
access publisher that was spun out of the above organisation by you and
Dietrich Rordorf in 2010. Is that correct, and are you saying that you are the
sole owner of MDPI AG (i.e. you own 100% of the company and there are no other
investors)?

S-K L: That is correct, and
currently I am the sole owner of the publishing house.

RP: Can you say how many employees MDPI has, how many are based in each
of the four offices, and where you personally are based? Also, what specific activities
take place in the three Chinese offices?

S-K L: I have lived in
Switzerland since 1989 and am currently based in Basel, although there are
frequent visits from staff based in Basel to China and vice-versa. There are about
30 employees in the Basel office, and 65 in each of the two offices in Beijing
and 90 in the office in Wuhan.

We also employ freelance English editors based in various locations. Editorial
work and some management tasks take place in all offices. Our in-house
production team doing file conversion (Word or LaTex to XML and to PDF, HTML)
is based in the Chinese offices. The IT team is split between Basel and one of
the Beijing offices.

Money and management

RP: What is MDPI’s current turnover and profit level? And is any
financial information about the company publicly available?

MDPI: The average invoice
amount for article processing charges in 2014 was approximately 1,250 CHF and
we published over 12,000 papers. About 25% of the papers were published free of
charge, mostly in journals that were launched over the past few years but also
many invited papers in established journals. We have no other significant
revenue streams (e.g. advertising), apart from a modest income from ordered
reprints.

RP: Presumably you earn revenue from the circa 60 institutions that
have joined the MDPI membership scheme, and perhaps you earn some income from
the Sciforum.net site?

S-K L: At present there is
no revenue from either of these two. However we may introduce a yearly fee for
membership in the future. We also have plans to earn revenue from some aspects
of Sciforum.net, although many services, such as MDPI conferences and discussion
groups, will remain free for users.

RP: My understanding is that researchers based in institutions that
have joined the MDPI membership scheme get a discount when they publish with
MDPI. If that is right, what is the discount, and can you say what value the
scheme has offered MDPI to date if it has not been earning any revenue from it?

MDPI: The discount available
for authors at member institutions is displayed on the institutional membership
website here, and is
typically 10%. We have seen an increase in submissions from member institutions
and it has helped us to work more closely with librarians.

Member institutions can access our submission system to track papers
submitted by their staff and APCs, and receive automated alerts for new
submissions. Our aim for the membership scheme is not primarily monetary, but
to build more direct links with authors and their institutions.

MDPI is expanding and re-investing a large part of the income (what
would otherwise be profits). Nonetheless, the company is debt free and our
earnings have allowed us to expand comfortably, while improving and enlarging
our services over the years.

So, for instance, we are currently investing in other services like Sciforum.net, which is a registration
and abstract processing platform for scholarly societies to handle their conferences.
Societies that self-manage their conferences can use it for free.

In 2014 we created a free platform that offers statistics about
scholarly publishers and their journals, mostly based on data from CrossRef.
Such initiatives take time and have a cost attached, but we want to offer them
for free to the community to help support scholarly communication and build
transparency.

RP: What is this free platform you mention?

MDP: The site is currently
in beta form, but can be viewed here.
We expect it to be fully functional later this year.

RP: Your point about reinvestment is well taken, but presumably MDPI
has audited accounts. So can I ask again: Can you share with me MDPI’s current
turnover and its profit (or loss) figure? And can you say whether these figures
are publicly available? Are they, for instance, available via a Swiss Companies
House? Do you publish them yourself on the Web?

S-K L: MDPI is a privately
owned Swiss company and as such has no obligations to publish accounts. We
don’t currently publish this information, however we reiterate that we are
financially sustainable. The revenue in 2014 was around 12 million CHF.

RP: What other business interests do you have, and has any money been
used from these to support MDPI, or money from MDPI used to support these other
businesses?

RP: Can I ask about management. I believe that Dietrich Rordorf has had
two periods as CEO of MDPI AG, and is currently CTO, having been replaced by Delia
Costache last year. Was this because Dietrich’s background is corporate finance
rather than publishing, whereas Delia worked as a Journal Publishing Manager at
scholarly publisher Wiley? Or was there some other reason?

S-K L: Delia Costache has a
great deal of experience in scholarly publishing and she has been the Journal
Development Manager of MDPI since she joined in 2013. Since February 2015 she
has been the CEO, replacing me who took over from Dietrich Rordorf ad interim in 2014.

RP: Why did Dietrich Rordorf cease to be CEO in 2014?

S-K L: This was so that
Dietrich could concentrate more time on management of some of the new IT
projects, such as Sciforum.net and the publisher statistics site mentioned
above. That is where he now focuses the majority of his attention.

RP: How many journals does MDPI
currently publish, are they all open access journals, and are they all
electronic only?

MDPI: We currently publish
137 journals — see here for
details. All of these are open access and in an online-only format.

RP: You said that MDPI charges approximately 1,250 CHF for publishing a
paper. The cost is not the same for all MDPI journals then? Also are there any
page charges?

MDPI: We do not apply the
same APC to all journals. Established journals with an impact factor have
higher APCs than the younger ones. There are no page charges. Specific information
about APCs is available here.
Applications for waivers or discounts are treated on a case by case basis.

RP: What criteria does MDPI apply when considering a waiver, and what do
researchers need to do to demonstrate that a waiver is appropriate in their
case?

MDPI: We have an exception
process to provide discounts or waivers in cases where authors are no longer
able to cover the full Article Processing Charges. Such applications are rare
and decisions are made based on the specific details of each case. We also
provide waivers and discounts as a service to external editors and publish
selected waived papers invited by editors.

Peer review and marketing

RP: What kind of peer review system does MDPI operate — e.g. traditional
peer review (blind/double blind etc.), or is some form of open peer review used?

MDPI: All journals offer traditional
single blind peer review: the reviewer names are anonymous, and at least two
review reports are obtained from at least two reviewers.

Life offers an option for open peer review, by which we mean
that authors have the option for review reports to be published with the final
manuscript and reviewers can optionally sign the published reports. We plan to
expand this to other journals in 2015 and implement a double-blind peer review
process for Business and Economics titles.

RP: What exactly is the process that papers go through when they are
submitted, and who makes what decision?

MDPI: Managing editors
receive submitted manuscripts and perform a basic check, desk rejecting
obviously poor manuscripts after consultation with the academic editors
(Editor-in-chief, Guest Editor, or an Editorial Board member). The Academic
Editor may advise on the selection of reviewers at this stage.

Papers are peer reviewed by at least two independent scholars, with
multiple rounds of review where necessary. The final decision to publish is
always made by an Academic Editor with no conflict of interest.

RP: Do the journals apply traditional
criteria when reviewing papers, or do they use a PLOS ONE-style model (no
subjective evaluation of a paper’s likely impact or importance, but papers must
be judged to be “technically sound”)?

MDPI: Published papers must
be technically sound and provide novelty. In most cases we don’t attempt to
judge the impact. However, academic editors are empowered to filter as they
wish.

RP: What is the average rejection rate of papers submitted to MDPI
journals?

MDPI: The overall rejection
rate has increased slightly in recent years from around 50% to a value of 52%
in 2014. In 2015 it lies at 54% so far.

RP: How many papers have been retracted from MDPI journals, and what is
the most common reason for retracting a paper?

MDPI: You can see all 23
retractions from MDPI here.
Reasons for retraction vary, and include duplicate publication, plagiarism,
fake data, authorship and funding issues, and misrepresented or misinterpreted
experiments.

MDPI is a member of
the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
and follows its guidelines where ethical issues are raised in relation to
articles.

RP: Does MDPI seek submissions to its journals by means of unsolicited
email messages? If so, how does it target the researchers it approaches, how
many messages does it send out a week, and if the recipients do not wish to
receive future email invitations what can they do to stop receiving them?

MDPI: We contact selected
researchers to invite them to contribute articles to our journals. In almost
all cases this is in relation to a special issue, and invitations are
coordinated with the Guest Editor. We also enforce strict limits on the number
of messages that can be sent and how often individuals are contacted.

We ensure that messages are directed to researchers who match the scope
of the invitation and do not, for example, purchase lists of contacts from
third parties. We are very aware that misdirected emails are not welcome,
however many scholars welcome notifications about opportunities to publish
within their field.

Our procedures strictly follow Swiss regulations, including clearly
visible information about the pricing of offered services, an option to opt out
of future similar messages, and protection of the data of recipients.

MDPI is not alone in sending out announcements of publishing
opportunities. We know from academic editors who work with us that other
leading publishing companies also send call for papers e-mails for their
journals.

RP: Can you clarify what you mean when you say that strict limits on
the number of messages that can be sent are enforced, and can you say
approximately how many unsolicited email invitations are sent out in a typical week?

MDPI: All such messages are
sent out after checking against a central database. This enables us to closely
control recipients, for example by performing final checks on the suitability
of recipients, check the size of mailings, control frequency of contact, and
enforce opt-out requests. A large fraction of recipients are authors,
reviewers, editors, or readers, who are already familiar with MDPI journals.

Jeffrey Beall and other critics

RP: As you will know, US librarian Jeffrey Beall runs a controversial web site in which he lists what he calls
“Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers”.
In February 2014, Beall added
MDPI. He has also written about MDPI on a number of other occasions alleging,
amongst other things, that the publisher spams
researchers, that it lists prominent researchers on its
editorial boards without
their agreement, and that it has published junk
science. I know that MDPI has responded to
these allegations, and I know that the Open Access Scholarly Publishers
Association (OASPA) — of
which MDPI is a member — has investigated Beall’s
claims and given MDPI a clean bill of health. I also know that MDPI has
responded separately to
the concerns that Beall and others (e.g. here, here, and
here) have
raised over the quality of some of the papers it has published. I contacted
Beall recently to ask if he now believes he was mistaken to include MDPI on his
site. He replied, “I do not believe I was wrong to place them on my list”.
Certainly, he has not removed MDPI from it. For the record, do you
categorically deny all the allegations that Beall has made against MDPI, and do
you reject the suggestion that there is anything predatory about MDPI and/or
its business practices?

MDPI: Of course, we deny all
of the accusations made by Jeffrey Beall. He has never made any attempt to
contact us to corroborate his claims. We have provided him with sufficient
evidence to counter the allegations he made, but he has chosen to ignore this
information.

There are many aspects that can be easily checked by looking at the
information on our website. For other allegations, we can provide evidence upon
request, and have done so to Jeffrey Beall, OASPA, and several other parties
who have enquired about these issues.

RP: At one time the prominent open access advocate Peter Suber was on
the editorial board of one of MDPI’s journals — a point made by Beall when he
added MDPI to his list. As I understand it, Suber is no longer associated with
MDPI in any way. Why is that?

MDPI: Peter Suber has served
on the Editorial boards of Future Internet (the same MDPI journal
that Jeffrey Beall formerly published a paper in), and subsequently the journal
Publications. He wrote to us in June 2014 that he no longer has
time to serve on the editorial board due to other commitments. He has never had
any other formal connection to MDPI, but provided support and advice immediately
after Jeffrey Beall added MDPI to his list, for which we are grateful.

RP: Do you believe that there are predatory open access publishers
operating today? If so, how significant a problem do you believe they pose for
the research community, and what can/should the community be doing to address
the problem?

MDPI: The term “predatory”
is pejorative and implies a business is exploiting its customers, for example
by leveraging market position to set prices which — under normal market
conditions — could not be realised, engaging in anti-competitive practices, or
charging without providing a service. We are aware of some questionable practices
by small entities that have tried to use the open access model to make money
while providing little or no service.

Unfortunately, some of these practices have had a detrimental effect on
the reputation of open access in general, but we believe that authors nowadays
are more vigilant. Organisations such as OASPA,
DOAJ and COPE, and
the numerous indexing services (for example, the Science
Citation Index Expanded [Web
of Science], PubMed, Scopus, Compendex etc.) are helpful
in identifying reputable publishers that meet standards and adhere to ethical
practices.

Whitelists are more useful to authors than blacklists, and the quality
of a publisher’s practices will show in the published content.

RP: Is MDPI’s continued inclusion on Beall’s list harming its business
in any way?

MDPI: As mentioned above,
the majority of scholars are capable of making up their own mind based on the
high standards of our editorial practices, membership of relevant
organizations, and indexing in the most relevant databases (75 % of our content
is indexed in Web of Science, for example).

Few scholars mention Beall’s list to us, but when provided with
information from our website and OASPA they usually decide to publish with us. Our
authors, reviewers and Academic Editors know our practices very well, and they
are the most appropriate references for our quality.

The overall effect is difficult to tell, but we have seen continued
steady growth in terms of the number of papers published. However, the posting
of incorrect information on the internet has certainly not been a benefit.

RP: What can publishers do if they feel that they have been
inappropriately added to a black list like the one run by Beall?

MDPI: Jeffrey Beall runs an
appeal service, which we requested. However the results were rather confusing.
The reviews, supposedly from independent experts, clearly showed that they had
not received any of the information we passed to Mr Beall, nor had the time to
perform a thorough review.

The reviews included comments like “The instructions to authors is
minimal”, “sites also lack instructions for referees, which lead me to question
whether or not they have any” (This information is easy to obtain and we could have
provided on request). Other comments included, “I can ‘smell’ some corruption”
(with no justification for this remark), and “Please accept my apology for
delay and not able [sic] to submit a proper report”.

We are aware of a number of people who have spoken to Mr Beall to
request MDPI’s removal, but he has chosen to ignore them.

It is up to the publishing community as a whole to evaluate the methods
of Jeffrey Beall and others like him, and decide whether they are capable of
running such a service. Given Beall’s well-known
opposition to open access and his reluctance to run his list in cooperation
with others or contact the organisations he criticises, we suggest that he is
biased and his methods of assessment are flawed.

RP: I believe that in February 2014, Dietrich Rordorf emailed the
Chancellor of the University of Colorado Denver (where Beall is employed)
asking him to intervene and have MDPI’s name removed from Beall’s list. Did he
get a sympathetic hearing? Did anything get resolved as a result of Rordorf’s email?

MDPI: We were referred to a
legal counsel and informed that the university was unwilling to investigate inclusion
in Beall’s list.

RP: Subsequently you personally emailed Beall (last November, around
eight months after OASPA had given MDPI a clean bill of health) to ask him to
remove MDPI from his list. In that email you wrote, “If you remove the post and
remove MDPI from your black list, I can give you the money and help you to do
your critics correctly.” Did you receive a response to this email? What did you
mean when you said you could give Beall money? And how much money did you have
in mind?

S-K L: This offer was to try
to help Mr Beall professionalise his operation. Services such as COPE, OASPA
and Retraction Watch have managed to
maintain themselves and improve their services through raising additional
funds.

Mr Beall did not respond to our proposal. Instead, we have undertaken
projects such as the publisher statistics
website to provide scholars with accurate information about publishers.

RP: MDPI has also been targeted by critics in China, or at least you personally
have — most notably by someone called Dr. Xin Ge. I am confused as to what this
is all about: can you say briefly what allegations have been made, and why you
think you have been targeted?

S-K L: Dr Xin Ge, a former
scientist, has been targeting a number of people associated with a well-known
Chinese scientist Dr
Shi-Min Fang, the inaugural winner of the John Maddox
Prize for “standing up for science”. Dr Ge has written over 20 open letters
to Nature, none of which have been
published. In a letter about me and MDPI, he made many ridiculous and false allegations.

It appears, however, that Jeffrey Beall may have read the allegations
and been influenced by them. MDPI’s relation to Dr Fang is through sponsorship
of the “Scientific Spirit Prize”, run
in China by Dr Fang.

RP: In one of his posts Beall says,
“When publishers like MDPI disseminate research by science activists like Stephanie
Seneff and her co-authors, I think it’s fair to question the credibility of
all the research that MDPI publishes. Will MDPI publish anything for money?” We
can assume the answer to this question is no, if only because MDPI did
not fall for the John Bohannon sting, the
details of which were published in Science in 2013. However, some believe that the article-processing charge is an
inherently problematic business model since, they say, it puts OA publishers under
considerable pressure to publish as many papers as possible. This, they add,
will inevitably lower the quality of published research. Would you agree that APCs
are problematic, and do you envisage MDPI eventually moving away from the APC
in favour of a different kind off business model?

MDPI: All papers published by MDPI have been through peer-review by at least
two experts.The final decision
to accept a paper is made by an external academic with no conflict of interest
– including financial interest – regarding publication: almost all our academic
editors work on a voluntary basis and none are full-time employees or operate
on a commission. This is the most important step in our editorial procedure to
ensure that the decisions to publish are unrelated to financial considerations.

Of course, every publishing model may have its weaknesses, for example
subscription models are biased against negative results, and typically earn at
least five times the income per paper that a gold open access journal does; journals
which rely on prestige have been known to publish flawed papers (see, for
instance, the paper
on arsenic-based lifeforms published in Science
in 2011 — or those published in Nature concerning methods of stem cell
production (here
and here).

The current trend for ‘big
deals’ for journal subscriptions has led to just a few very large
publishers controlling a large amount of academic publishing and less
competition. We constantly review our procedures to see where we can improve,
and fully investigate any cases of questionable publication reported to us.
However, we are satisfied that our processes are robust, and many active
scholars around the globe are willing to publish with MDPI.

We do not have plans to move away from the APC model. However we will monitor
any emerging models and respond as necessary.

RP: I am wondering whether it would be easier for researchers to
establish who was predatory and who was legitimate if OA publishers were more
transparent about their activities and their finances. I am also thinking that greater
transparency might prevent legitimate publishers from being accused of being
predatory. For instance, I realise that private companies are not obliged by law
to publish their accounts, but might it not help if OA publishers did make them
public? In addition, some argue that the concept of open access implies more
than simply making research freely available, that it also places OA publishers
under an obligation to be more transparent and open about their activities than
traditional scholarly publishers. Indeed, even publishing consultant Joseph
Esposito has called for
greater transparency. As he put it, “Let’s be open about open access”. Are you sympathetic
to such suggestions? If not, what are your reservations?

MDPI: We think that open
access publishers are more transparent about their revenues compared to
subscription-based publishers. OA publishers display their charges on the
website and one can easily calculate a rough estimate of the income by counting
the number of papers.

In the case of subscription based journals, you know the price per
subscription, but the number of subscriptions per journal is usuallyconfidential, as well as other sources of income at
journal level (advertising, reprints, copyright, etc.). Of course, they publish
an annual report, but these are general figures for the company overall, or per
division.

RP: Finally, can you say what plans you have for MDPI in the future,
and what your goals are for the company in the next few years?

S-K L: We aim to continue supporting scholars in
communicating and disseminating their research by expanding all of MDPI’s
ongoing projects.

1 comment:

1. Research-integrity investigator Professor Robert Clark AO in July 2014 advised co-authors Professor Jennie Brand-Miller and Dr Alan Barclay to re-write their extraordinarily faulty Australian Paradox paper: "This new paper should be written in a constructive manner that respects issues relating to the data in the Australian Paradox paper raised by the complainant [me]. JBM and AWB responded that they would do so: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/independent-review-finds-issues-with-controversial-sugar-paper/5618490 ; http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/RR-response-to-inquiry-report.pdf

2. JBM and AWB didn’t rewrite. Now October 2015, the Charles Perkins Centre's highly influential researchers have not rewritten their “shonky sugar study”, and they haven’t fixed the formal scientific record. Instead, they continue to operate the University of Sydney’s Glycemic Index business that exists in part to charge food companies for stamping products that are up to 99.4% sugar as Low-GI health-foods: http://www.gisymbol.com/category/products/sweeteners/

3. I was enraged in August 2015 when I noticed that instead of correcting her false Australian Paradox “finding” - that there is “an inverse relationship” between sugar consumption and obesity - Professor Brand-Miller assisted the sugar industry to feature her false pro-sugar Australian Paradox “finding”, in the process of the industry pretending that added sugar in modern doses is not harmful to public health:http://www.srasanz.org/news/do-carbohydrates-cause-weight-gain http://www.srasanz.org/about-us http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/a-spoonful-of-sugar-is-not-so-bad/story-e6frg8y6-1226090126776 pp. 13-15 http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/obesitysummit.pdfhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21371/epdf